Pearl Harbor Victim’s Kin Mine a Family Legend for Answers

As he sat on a ferry motoring toward the rusty, twisted hulk of a battleship sunk at Pearl Harbor, years of memories flashed through Winston Carter’s mind: images of an older brother leaving home for the Navy, a newspaper boy carrying word of the Japanese attack, a mourning mother dreaming at night that her son was still alive.

Something else was less clear, and it nagged Carter, who is my father. It was a story told in the family about his brother, my uncle --Burton.

In the story, two friends went off to war. At Pearl Harbor, they palled around together. The story was that they had forged liberty passes the night of Dec. 6, 1941, but Burton returned to duty and his friend stayed out. And the friend was the one who came back home.

Scanning the Arizona’s memorial plaque, bearing the names of the 1,177 men aboard who died Dec. 7, 1941, my father wondered again: Was the story true?

It would take almost 15 years for him to find the answer.

Boyhood Friends Went to War

This much Winston Carter knew: In November 1940, Burton dropped out of San Diego High School to follow his best friend into the Navy. He got his father drunk to sign his enlistment papers.

The two boys had been friends since the 7th grade, brought together by a love of practical jokes and the occasional brawl. Both came from homes with absentee fathers, stern mothers and a lack of money.

Once in the Navy, the two were eventually assigned together to the Arizona--Burton as a radio operator, his friend as a topside turret gunner.

But that’s where the facts stopped and legend began.

Winston was barely 5 years old when Pearl Harbor was attacked.

He remembers the event as a child does: A newspaper boy was walking through the streets, shouting “Extra! Extra! Pearl Harbor bombed!”

He remembers his mother, sitting at a kitchen table, crying and clutching a piece of paper. A telegram advised that the second-born of her four sons was missing in action aboard the Arizona.

And he remembers, three years later at age 8 or so, walking along a darkened San Diego street after dinner with his mother and a man in a Navy uniform. The man had been his brother’s friend. His name was Delbert. And as young Winston grew older, the story Delbert told, though imperfectly remembered, stayed with him:

Burton wanted to join Delbert on liberty from the Arizona on Dec. 6, 1941. He forged a pass with an officer’s signature.

The two friends went to a dance and had a few drinks. At the end of the night, out of money and worried he would get caught, Burton returned to the ship. The next morning he was dead.

Delbert survived because he stayed out. He was later assigned to the aircraft carrier Hornet, where his job was loading bombs onto airplanes. On April 18, 1942, he wrote “Burton’s Revenge” on a bomb loaded onto one of Lt. Col. Jimmy Doolittle’s B-25 bombers. The plane took off from the Hornet to make the first U.S. strike on Japanese soil.

Later, Delbert gave the pin used to arm “Burton’s bomb” to the Carter family. The pin--a red paper disk with arming instructions --became a treasured memento.

When Winston’s mother, Rosadele Carter, died, he found the pin and Burton’s purple heart in her hope chest.

History Teacher on a Personal Quest

In 1985, after Winston made his pilgrimage to the Arizona memorial and read the name “Burton Lowell Carter,” he became determined to know more.

He was a history teacher, and he started gathering information like a historian, even graphic details of the attack. One bomb had crashed through the midship deck about 8 a.m., exploding in the crew compartments where sailors slept.

He collected personal testimony about the bombing and the writings of survivors like M.T. Hurst: “I started to go forward and saw many Marines and sailors lying about the deck badly burned. I tried to help one, but he was pretty much blown up.”

Winston asked, “Did Burton suffer? Was he burned to death?”

He asked his oldest brother, Stan, about the best friend. Who was he? Was he alive? What else did he tell the family?

Stan said the man’s name was Delbert Wueste. He remembered meeting “this Wueste fellow” shortly after the war, but recalled little. Stan’s ex-wife, Barbara McCracken, later revealed a detail of the meeting. Wueste brought a little boy with him--a son he had named Burton.

With little more to go on, Carter over the years searched records. There was no Delbert Wueste at San Diego High School. None on the Arizona’s crew manifest.

He picked the fading memories of family members, but none knew what had happened to Delbert. They mentioned the Major League baseball player Solly Hemus, saying he had been a childhood friend of Burton’s. Did he remember a Delbert Wueste? No, he said.

Was Wueste on another ship? The Utah? The Oklahoma? The West Virginia? All were anchored along Pearl Harbor’s Battleship Row the morning of Dec. 7, 1941.

“Dad, are you sure that’s the name?” I asked after the Associated Press’ research team failed to turn up a Delbert Wueste in national telephone books and record searches, and naval personnel records had no listing for such a man on any of those ships.

No, he said. He wasn’t even sure about the story anymore.

But part of it had to be true, he reasoned. He had the bomb pin, and his brother’s ex-wife remembered the meeting and a little boy bearing his brother’s name.

Visit to Vegas Proves Fruitful

Weeks later, a chance visit to Las Vegas proved a boon.

Sitting at the kitchen table with two cousins, Winston went through old family photos, including some that had been inside a suitcase belonging to an uncle who died in 1961. The contents of the suitcase had sat untouched for nearly four decades.

One cousin handed Winston a 2-by-3-inch yellowed envelope addressed to his mother and dated March 8, 1945, from Corpus Christi, Texas.

It was a birth announcement for a Burton Weast.

“That’s it! This is it! This is the name,” he said, running for the telephone, recalled his cousin, Sheila Stanley.

Within hours, an AP records search turned up a Delbert and Burton Weast living in Oregon.

“This is going to sound a bit strange,” I told Burton over the phone, “but I think you’re named after my uncle--my uncle who died at Pearl Harbor.” I quickly related the story and my father’s efforts to find Delbert.

“Yes, that’s us,” Burton Weast said. “My dad is alive.”

The first call between my father and Delbert brought memories of long-gone loved ones flooding back.

Part Fact, Part Fiction

The family legend, it turned out, was part fact, part fiction--the melding of two stories.

As Delbert explained, the two were aboard the Arizona until some weeks before the attack.

Because they were assigned to different parts of the ship, Burton often swapped duties to be off at the same time as Delbert and once forged the signature of the duty officer to get off the ship.

“Burton could talk his way out of anything,” he said.

At least several weeks before the attack, Delbert was transferred to Norfolk, Va., to become an ordnance specialist for a new bomber squadron later assigned to the Hornet.

“I carried my gear off the ship, turned and waved to Burton. He was standing on the deck of the ship, waving goodbye,” Delbert said, fighting back tears. “I was the first person he saw when he arrived in Pearl, and he was the last person I saw when I left.”

Yes, he said, he wrote Burton’s name on a bomb that was loaded onto one of Doolittle’s planes. His inscription: “To Tojo [Japan’s wartime leader], From Burton Carter.”

“You have to understand, I hated those people for what they did to Burton. They killed him. I wanted to hurt them,” he said, his voice cracking with emotion. “He was more than just my friend. I loved Burton. He was like a brother to me.”

He continued: “If I hadn’t joined the Navy, he wouldn’t have followed me. He’d still be alive.”

And yes, Delbert was the uniformed sailor who walked along a darkened street with Winston and his mother all those years ago. He had come, he said, to give Mrs. Carter the bomb pin.

“Burton was smart. He was a fun person to be around,” Delbert said. “So is my son. He couldn’t have a better, more honorable name.”